Ryder elected to give up the Smock Alley tenancy when his landlord offered to release him from liability for rent arrears of £3,615 if he surrendered the premises. Unknown to Ryder, Daly had been in negotiation with the landlord and had agreed to assume responsibility for the arrears on being granted possession of the playhouse. By "stratagem and inducements" he then persuaded the best of Ryder's players to join him in a new company at Smock Alley. Manager of Smock Alley Early success Under Daly's management the redecorated Smock Alley Theatre opened in November 1780 with a prelude bearing the title "Smock Alley Secrets" (written by Rev. Peter Le Fanu, a fashionable Dublin clergyman) followed by Richard Cumberland's comedy The West Indian and Isaac Bickerstaffe's farce The Sultan, Daly and his wife playing in the first two of these. A week later they appeared in a production of The School for Scandal, in which Daly's performance was reckoned by the critic for the Hibernian Journal to be "all the Author intended or the Audience could wish. He is a most promising young Actor and receives the Applause his Merit justly Claims". In the following month the couple featured in the first Irish production of Hannah Cowley's The Belle's Stratagem, which had been the major success of that year's London theatre season and was staged by Daly "with magnificence not at all inferior to Covent Garden. Daly's management of Smock Alley was quickly rewarded with commercial success: "he not only had the best company Ireland could then produce but engaged the principal London stars and got up the most celebrated pieces as soon as they were established in London". To increase interest in his productions he sometimes reversed gender in comedies and light opera, having men play female characters and vice versa – though when he cast his wife in male roles she refused to wear men's clothing. Early members of his company included the actress Sarah Hitchcock and her husband Robert (the later historian of Irish theatre) who became prompter and afterward deputy manager at Smock Alley. Robert Hitchcock recruited others to the troupe and was instrumental in the engagement (at the "star" salary of £5 per week) of John Philip Kemble who, in 1781, made his first appearance for Daly in the role of Hamlet. When subsequently miscast as Sir George Touchwood in The Belle's Stratagem, Kemble's "negligent delivery